Elio: a little boy longs to be abducted by aliens in Pixar’s sweet space adventure

Pixar’s animated films have long been feted for their bold premises, from making a hero of a non-verbal cleaning robot on an empty Earth (Wall-E, 2008), to a farce about a teen girl’s magic transformations, featuring sanitary pads and budding sexuality (Turning Red, 2022). Conversely, Pixar is castigated when it makes more conventional films, without such arresting ideas.  

Elio may fail to find a following for that reason – its box-office opening was Pixar’s worst. Its trailers suggested little more than a comedy-adventure about a lonely boy (the titular Elio) and his outer-space encounters with strange-shaped aliens. Indeed, that’s what much of Elio is, and some parts feel familiar. That’s despite the presence of Turning Red’s Domee Shi, who helmed Elio together with Madeline Sharafian. A third director’s credit goes to Adrian Molina (Coco, 2017), who conceived the film but dropped out during production. But its heart is convincingly melancholic, and when Elio’s inevitable redemption comes, it’s more moving than mawkish. 

Mourning his off-screen dead parents, Elio struggles to connect with his aunt, Major Olga (Zoe Saldaña), who gave up many of her own aspirations to raise him. Still, Olga works in the space programme, albeit in an unglamorous post, detecting potentially hazardous space debris. This detail has a delayed but exciting payoff towards the end, as do other details in Elio’s early scenes. 

Elio thinks there’s no place for him on Earth, only in the stars. (The film doesn’t shy from showing how unpleasantly self-obsessed this makes him.) Sneaking into his aunt’s workplace, he miraculously contacts an alien civilisation and is mistaken for Earth’s leader. It’s wish-fulfilling perfection for the thrilled boy, until he suddenly finds himself having to negotiate with warlike aliens. They have the demeanour of Star Trek Klingons but resemble eyeless worms inside their armour.  

The plotting is unusual – a happy ending appears to be within Elio’s grasp at several points before slipping away. Despite this oddity, the film only becomes truly interesting in its second half, when Olga comes back into the story through a clever subplot. Elio sends a fake clone of himself back to Earth to fool her but is distraught when she accepts this better-behaved boy without question. 

For all the film’s rote space wonders, one of Elio’s most poignant moments takes place on a darkened, almost empty beach. The crowning scene, though, involves another parent and a simple but breath-taking transformation that could be taken as a radical statement of gender fluidity, or just the comeback of a de-masculinised “new man” in the age of Andrew Tate. 

► Elio is in UK cinemas now.